Twitter slowly unfolding its search ambitions

It has been fairly obvious for a few years that the search-driven, URL-centric web would converge with the web of social objects. It is something that is driving Google’s paranoia. It is also something Facebook dreams about. However, the company most likely to capture the opportunity is Twitter, the San Francisco-based company that started life as a micro-messaging company but has now evolved into a new kind of hybrid-media platform.

Twitter has been slowly transforming itself into a post-Google information company. In past few weeks alone it has unveiled expandable tweets, hashtag-based pages and other similar innovations. These embellishments to their core messaging offering show that it is Twitter, and not Facebook, that Google has to worry about.

But just like Google’s idea of search was very different from the search offered by web directories such as Lycos and Yahoo, Twitter too has to re-imagine the idea of search.

The answer to that question for Twitter is its “discover” function. Honestly, discover could use a lot of help and improvement. On our touch-centric and voice enabled devices of the future, the idea of search has to be less textual. So Twitter as a company needs to be making it easy for us to surface all the information.

This post was updated at 12:44p.m. to clarify that Twitter recently introduced expandable tweets, not embedded tweets.